DIY

It has been a while since I was thinking about upgrading my drone to a first person view version aka FPV. The idea was placing a camera for video streaming in real time. My first attempt was with a small raspi board and streaming image data from a raspi camera via WiFi. Because of the latency, range, and complicated setup this solution was not very practical. Therefore, I decided to make a "real" FPV drone.

Recently NASA has made the first powered flight on Mars. They have deployed a drone called Ingenuity costing about $85 million. The helicopter was able to fly on about ten meters altitude (as of May, 7) over the surface of the Red Planet. Coincidently, I have also built a flying drone. This looked like a good challenge and an opportunity to learn about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Here is what I learned.

Here is a step by step tutorial on how to design objects for 3D printing using OpenSCAD. We illustrate the design process by creating a micro quadcopter frame. This small drone bears the code name of Beatle-1. After following the tutorial you will be able to conceive your own designs for 3D printing.

We will build an autonomous robot. Captured by robot's camera, video stream will be analyzed by a neural network. The network will be running on the onboard Raspberry Pi that will steer the robot. Before you start with the project, I want you to answer two questions. First, how everything will be attached mechanically? Second, what will be the energy source? While your autonomous robot can work from a cardboard box, having a mechanically sound chassis will greatly improve the result on the AI training stage.

Raspberry Pi is great. It is a small and cheap computer that can be used for a variety of projects. Sometimes you may wish to remotely control a Rasperry Pi that is in your local WiFi network. This is possible and even quite easy. We will use a Secure Shell aka SSH to establish a remote connection. I assume that you have previously connected your Raspberry Pi board to a WiFi network.